Have you seen the movie "Short Circuit" (1986, director - John Badham)? I first watched this in 1997/8 when I was studing engineering. I liked it very much. As you have mentioned "robots making robots" I recalled that movie first even before "iRobot" which also I liked. :)

The garments don't talk to each other (e.g. two dance teachers wearing a track suit wouldn't have communication between the suits) but the microcontrollers talk to each other. In the case of the dance garment, they relay info via lights while, in the NASA shirt, information is sent to a computer to be analyzed. Georgia Tech and NASA are working on that process now.

Having seen the movie Baxter (1989), a chilling horror flick about a vicious dog narrated by his inner voice, I think I'll stay far away from a robot named Baxter. Who enforces Isaac Asimov's Laws of Robotics these days?

[Subject line is Baxter's catch-phrase: "Beware of the dog who thinks".]

As regards to Rethink Robotics' Baxter, classically trained Applied Mechanics specialists like me always get thrown off a bit when one offers phrases like "robot's arms provide 70 degrees of freedom!" A better phrase would be "a total of 70 degrees of freedom" and even there one should make a distinction on mechanical degrees of freedom (3 translations and 3 rotations). Because the MEMS crowd, particularly the marketing folks, are already lumping temperature and magnetic heading in to degrees of freedom when describing a multifunction sensor.

@Sanjib.A: you have a point there! Technically the way the jumpsuit is described isn't I-o-T, whether wired or wireless. It is just a collection of components connected by a bus. But one could argue that the jacket is indeed an I-o-T when it talks to other 'things' in a personal-area-network!

" A central microcontroller provides power and I2C data connections to each limb."
Just trying to understand the philosophy behind including the "Jumpsuit" in the category of IoT devices; since the sensors in the limbs talk to the microcontroller using I2C interface, how this suit qualifies to be a IoT device? Are these individual jumpsuits (microcontrollers) talk to each other?

In conjunction with unveiling of EE Times’ Silicon 60 list, journalist & Silicon 60 researcher Peter Clarke hosts a conversation on startups in the electronics industry. One of Silicon Valley's great contributions to the world has been the demonstration of how the application of entrepreneurship and venture capital to electronics and semiconductor hardware can create wealth with developments in semiconductors, displays, design automation, MEMS and across the breadth of hardware developments. But in recent years concerns have been raised that traditional venture capital has turned its back on hardware-related startups in favor of software and Internet applications and services. Panelists from incubators join Peter Clarke in debate.